Who Lost Afghanistan?

Something funny happened to Richard Holbrooke on the way to the negotiating table

By

James Traub

April 19, 2013 5:11 p.m. ET

Richard Holbrooke, the late, great American diplomat and broker of the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the Balkans war, has had his posthumous revenge—whether he wanted it or not. Holbrooke served as President Barack Obama's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, or SRAP, from January 2009 until his sudden death in December 2010. But "AfPak" proved to be a Rubik's Cube too hard even for Holbrooke to solve. Or so it has seemed until now: In "The Dispensable Nation," Vali Nasr, a former senior adviser to the SRAP office, insists that Holbrooke had the answer for both countries...